


love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight

by pondify



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Heavy Angst, M/M, Swearing, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 08:24:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4997698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pondify/pseuds/pondify
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He reminds himself that this is what he wanted, but no, it really isn’t, because he wanted Phil to <i>talk to him</i>, not destroy his entire goddamn life again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight

**Author's Note:**

> post-breakup drabble where phil has moved on and dan is still hopeless as fuck
> 
>  **WARNING:** this fic is depressing and has mentions of suicide and self-harm. it's nothing too heavy but it's still there! if you're triggered by these things please be careful in reading this fic
> 
> title is from i'm looking through you by the beatles

It’s almost funny, Dan thinks, how a single text from Phil can fuck everything up.

Everything he’s done, this façade that he’s spent so long working on, this carefully crafted mask, this wall he’s built up – all of it gone in a single second, just from one text. One text and he’s wrecked again, and the fucking floodgates open to all his rage and despair and _fuck._

(He reminds himself that this is what he wanted, but no, it really isn’t, because he wanted Phil to _talk to_ _him_ , not destroy his entire goddamn life again.)

Dan’s way of coping is to send five texts total in reply, all angry, two of them so long that when he rereads them over and over he has to scroll down in order to see the whole thing. The last text reads _oh, and fuck you_ and he hates himself for saying it, and then he hates Phil for making him say it, for making him think it in the first place, because the worst part is that he means it.

Maybe the only part he didn’t mean is the part where he said _if you think that i still have feelings for you now then you’re wrong because i don’t know why the fuck i would still like you_ but that’s not what he wants to think about right now.

He doesn’t want to think about anything right now.

The only light source in Dan’s room is the evening sunlight slicing through the gaps in the blind over his window as he lays on his bed with his headphones plugged in, playing his music just a little too loud. But it’s not loud enough to drown out his thoughts. And he tries not to think about it, he does.

It doesn’t work.

He digs his fingernails into his palms and bites his bottom lip so hard it becomes swollen and blood-red and breathes, just breathes, deep and slow and loud and it’s not enough. So he holds his breath and stares at the wall and waits for at least sixty seconds, waits until his lungs are screaming before he lets his breath out with a _whoosh_ , and then he lays there for another several seconds before letting himself take a normal breath.

It’s still not enough. Nothing is enough.

He feels like shit because he _is_ shit, he reasons with himself, rolling over and pressing the “volume up” button on his phone in a half-hearted attempt to… he isn’t even sure what he’s trying to do, but it’s not working. The voice in his head telling him that he’s a horrible person isn’t even a whisper anymore, it’s just his own fucking voice, his regular thoughts. It’s a fact like anything else. The sky is blue. Earth orbits the sun. Dan Howell is a piece of shit.

If he’s honest with himself – which he rarely ever is – he feels guilty as hell. He feels guilty for going off on Phil (who was admittedly being kind of a dick and had texted him out of the blue just to fuck with his mind, saying things like _i am sending this message only to tell you one thing. i won’t reply if you do._ and _i also was told that you just wanted to find out about my boyfriend and that you still like me._ and _just stop okay. it is over._ ). Technically, Phil hadn’t done anything too bad to him, not this time. And Dan had fucking exploded.

He curls his hands into fists again and feels his nails bite into his skin. The word that keeps surfacing in his mind is _self-destructive_ , and maybe that’s what he is, or somehow what he wants to be. He wants to scream until his voice gives out and his throat is raw and he wants to cry until the knot in his chest loosens and he can breathe, but he restrains himself; he wants to slice open his chest and bleed until every trace of Phil is gone from him, but he knows that’s not possible without killing himself, and maybe he wants to die but he won’t. Not today.

But Phil is gone. Phil left him.

Dan’s been rejected too many times in the past four months and even those unanswered angry texts feel like a betrayal, somehow, and he wishes he could take them back but he thinks he wouldn’t even if he could.

He wants to tell himself that it was the right thing to do, to finally fucking say what he was feeling, but his heart aches too much and he feels too shattered to believe it.

(He unlocks his phone and stares at the screen and his own furious words stare back at him.

_i don’t know why i hoped that you’d try to talk to me because you did and it was pointless. i don’t know why i ever hoped we could fix things because you’re showing me that there’s nothing left to fix. and i don’t know why i still thought i had feelings for you because it’s obvious that you don’t care about my feelings. i should’ve known that you were just going to do something like this if you ever talked to me again._

He feels like he’s going to be sick.)

Dan knows he’s going to be okay someday, but right now he’s not. Right now he is a hurricane, destroying himself and everything around him, so he locks himself in his room and loses himself in his music so he doesn’t have to face the world.


End file.
